SOUTH KOREA

South Korea is a wealthy and technologically advanced country, but its citizens are anxious, stressed, and headed toward demographic collapse, according to Gonzalez and Lee’s book-length study.

Gonzalez, an American educator who’s taught high school in South Korea, and Lee, a South Korean financial analyst and professor, have conducted a wide-ranging survey of the titular country’s manifest virtues and nagging problems. On the plus side, they note, is a culture that values hard work, competitiveness, self-sacrifice, and efficiency; society demands instant solutions to every problem and employs all manner of time-saving gadgetry, from restaurant call buttons that instantly summon waiters to self-service medical kiosks. The authors have found much unhappiness beneath the bustle, however. Several chapters discuss South Korea’s preoccupation with education: In the struggle to score well on the all-important exams that govern admission to elite universities, parents supplement their kids’ regular schooling with expensive “cram schools” and private tutoring, both of which strain family finances and leave students exhausted from the pressure. (An unexpected consequence, the authors note, is degree inflation: 69% of young Koreans have postsecondary degrees, which devalues educational credentials in the job market.) The authors also spotlight high rates of fatal accidents—capsized ferries, building collapses, deadly fires, workplace mishaps—stemming from lax safety regulations, corner-cutting, and corruption. They investigate what they see as a widespread soul-sickness that manifests in the corrosion of traditional norms and the younger generation’s sense of being stuck in a materialistic rat race (as in the Netflix series Squid Game, which depicts a South Korean game show in which players risk sudden death for money). The book also confronts a truly existential risk for the country in the form of extremely low fertility rates.

The authors construct their panorama of South Korea’s fortunes by combining illuminating statistics and graphs with an intimate, deeply observed account of cultural aspects, from the intense popularity of K-pop and plastic surgery to the warm tradition of sharing food with strangers. (Their vignette of a South Korean dinner paints a vibrant portrait of Confucian values in everyday life: “Everyone digs in with zest, enjoying every bite while being careful not to appear too eager or selfish or eat faster or larger quantities than the rest of the group.”) The lucid, workmanlike prose adds psychological resonance to the sociology (“Young Koreans are devastated by and frustrated with the economy’s inability to create sufficient, well-paying permanent jobs to accommodate the number of university graduates”), and it’s supplemented by revealing interviews: “Employment is… It’s like a big wall and trauma for me,” observes one young job seeker. “As soon as I graduated, I felt like an unnecessary [piece of] garbage in society, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t even get an interview.” Readers interested in South Korea’s paradoxical tensions will find a wealth of insights, but the authors offer a larger lesson about the trajectory of modernity that could apply to many other countries that, having dedicated themselves to economic growth and material abundance, find themselves mired in a frustrating spiritual malaise.

An absorbing analysis of the social discontentment that plagues South Korea’s economic success.